Our link to last week's clip of Sarah Lamb and Federico Bonelli is swans. Here is the sublime Mariinsky star Uliana Lopatkina dancing The Dying Swan, choreographed by Mikhail Fokine in 1907 to Saint-Saëns' famous cello solo Le Cygne. Lopatkina is a tall, stately dancer who approaches her art with an almost religious gravity of purpose, and has – as I think this clip shows – the most beautiful arms in ballet. Watch the way they move not from the elbow, or even the shoulder, but from deep in her back. That rippling flow has its origins in the steely core of abdominal and lower-back muscles from which, in the fully finished dancer, every impulse radiates outwards (here, in the ballet class, is where the process begins). Lopatkina, in her early 30s when this clip was recorded, seems not only to describe the wings of the swan, but the melancholy dilemma of the dancer herself, whose performing career must die with her youth.

If you're a ballet fan you might have heard of Uliana Lopatkina, but you probably won't know John Lennon da Silva, seen here and above in an early round of a Brazilian TV reality show. Stick with this clip, though (especially from 1:50), because they've got more in common than you might imagine. Like Lopatkina's, Da Silva's self-choreographed performance works at both the representational and the metaphorical level. The city of São Paolo, where he lives, is one of the most dangerous in South America, and the closing moments of Da Silva's piece seems to speak of young men like himself, dying before their time. Ultimately, though, both dancers take us to a place where language is redundant. It's all about the arms and wings.